A SONG IN THE MORNING (15 page)

• * •

Major Swart had fretted through the morning. He had sat in his office at the end of a corridor behind an automatic locking steel-barred door, willing the telephone to shout for him.

The two warrant officers who did most of the footwork in his small empire had called earlier to report that they had lost Arkwright, been tricked by him on the underground.

Their second call had told Swart that they had picked him up again when he returned to his flat. Swart wanted badly to know the identity of the young man in the well-cut suit who had been huddled at the meeting with Thiroko. That young man was probably worth opening up, and Arkwright should have been the way to him.

There was a third call. Arkwright had just drawn the curtains to his room. From his state of undress it was to be assumed he was taking his slut to bed.

* • •

They sat in the kitchen. The sink and the stove needed three hours' work from a strong-willed woman. Jack doubted there had ever been a woman in George Hawkins' life, certainly no kids. The blaster never talked about a woman, talked mostly about his three cats. Big, confident brutes they seemed to Jack, sleeping on the kitchen table or striding over the stove or licking at used plates in the sink bowl. Jack sat on an old explosive box, upturned and covered by a grimed cushion. George was scooping cat food from a tin.

Jack thought the cats ate better than the old blaster.

"Was it just kiddie's bullshit?"

Jack said, "I've found the right man, probably."

"For trusting?"

"I have to."

"Genuine guy?"

"He's on the military side."

The cats were chewing fiercely. George put a page of newspaper over the tin, left it on the window ledge above the sink.

"The targets are in South Africa?"

"Yes."

"Do you have a bloody conscience?"

"I don't."

"It's explosives, lad. It's not just a firework show where everyone has a good laugh and hears a big bang. Explosives get to hurt people."

"I don't want to hurt people. I just want to get my father out of that place."

"That's a piss poor answer."

"I don't know where yet, the first target will be in Johannesburg."

"Good and big, where the whole city sees it. I'll rot in hell, certain. You're talking about an act of war. It's bloody Harrods, lad; it's the Grand Hotel, it's the bandstand in Regent's Park, it's the Household effing Cavalry you're talking about. Have you got the guts for that?"

"I have to, or he's going to hang."

"There was a bomb in Northern Ireland, the La Mon House hotel . . . "

George went to a drawer. He excavated among cartridge boxes and pamphlets and books and old newspapers and older bills. He took out a nearly clean sheet of blank paper.

He flicked his fingers for Jack to pass him a pen. He started to draw the diagram.

Firm and bold strokes of the pen.

"If they ever knew George Hawkins drew this for you then I'd be bloody lucky, Jack boy, if they just shot me."

"My father hasn't told them anything, I'm not intending to start."

"You take that away with you, and you learn it by heart, and you flush it away. Don't take that on your bloody aeroplane . . . What's the gaol?"

The marmalade cat had eaten too fast. It vomited on the linoleum. George seemed not to notice. Jack told him that Pretoria Central was a complex of five gaols. In the centre was the hanging gaol. He didn't know the lay out, didn't know where his father's cell was, didn't know the guard patterns. He didn't know any bloody thing.

"If I told you it was just daft."

"I'd say you should mind your own business, Mr Hawkins."

"By helping you, am I just getting you killed?"

"Without you, I'd help myself."

George turned over the sheet of paper.

"Is it an old gaol or a new one?"

"I think it's newish."

"It'll have a wall round it. If it were old it would be brick or stone. If it's less than twenty years then it'll be reinforced concrete . . . You'd be better off just getting pissed every night 'til they hang him . . . "

"How do I knock a hole in reinforced concrete?"

"We're not even talking about how you're going to get into a security area, up against the bloody wall . . . You're not going to be able to drill holes and use cartridges. You're not going to be able to use lay-on charges, because you'd need a dumper load of earth to cover them or you'd have to shift a ton of sandbags."

"Don't tell me what I can't do."

"Easy, lad . . . Professor Charles Monroe, Columbia University, way back before we were born. It's what's called the Monroe Effect. It's the principle of armour piercing, what they use against tanks. Shaped or hollow charge, it's what it's called. Jack, they'll shoot you dead . . . "

"Draw me the shaped charge."

It was dusk when Jack left. He was in his car, the window wound down. George was bent to talk to him.

"I'll miss you, lad."

Jack grinned. "I won't be gone more than three weeks."

"I'm a bloody fool to have talked to you."

"Could it work, Mr Hawkins?"

" 'Course it can work. If you remember everything I've told you, and if you remember everything you've seen over the last two years, and
if
you do everything like you've seen me do it, then it'll work. Forget one thing, a little small thing, and you're gone."

"I'll come on down and tell you how it worked."

George snorted. He turned away quickly, so Jack shouldn't see his face. He went back through his front door.

He didn't look over his shoulder as Jack drove away.

When he was clear of the lane, out of sight of the bungalow, he stabbed the engine into life. The excitement gripped him. The same excitement as when his final school exam results had come through, and his university admission, and his first girl, and his winning of the job at D & C Ltd.

Brilliant flowing excitement, like the first time George had let him do a blast. If he remembered every last little thing, then he could do it. He could take his father out.

* • •

"We're to meet tomorrow with the Prime Minister to talk damage limitation."

"I don't think there'll be damage," the Director General said. "I have learnt many things from our man's records.

One of them is his tried and tested loyalty to the Service.

He won't talk."

"Then he'll hang with his secrets." The P.U.S. rocked his glass slowly, willing the juice from the slice of lemon into further circulation.

"Our
secrets."

"The Prime Minister would look unkindly on the least embarrassment."

"It won't come to that. I'd bet money on Carew's silence."

He paused. "The fact is, I should like very much to save this man. I quite accept that it is politically unacceptable to go cap in hand and ask for his freedom, tell them who he is. We have looked at the odds against a team of men lifting him out of this gaol, and they are high."

"Too high, I don't doubt, and the Prime Minister wouldn't countenance the risk of failure. For heaven's sake don't let's have any old-fashioned stunts. The saving of Mr Carew's life just doesn't warrant the risking of anyone else's, not when you add the political risk."

* * *

Neither in London nor Lusaka did Jacob Thiroko have to consult with colleagues.

That night, alone, he would take the decision on whether the military wing of the African National Congress would back the venture proposed by Jack Curwen.

Amongst the senior officers of the Umkonto we Sizwe there were some who saw Whites, even if they were prepared to make the same sacrifices, as having no place in the Movement. Those Blacks of the military wing treated all Whites associating themselves with the A.N.C. with suspicion. They believed all of those Whites were communists first, true to the South African Communist Party, and loyal to the African National Congress, second.

Thiroko was not a communist. He had been to Moscow.

He believed the Soviets, for all their aid in weapons and money, to be more racist than the Italians or the English or the Dutch or the Swedes.

If he were to have admitted to those senior officers of the military wing that a White had come to him with a plan of action and that he had supported him without consulting them then there would be questions circulated about his fitness to lead. Nevertheless, it would be his decision alone.

He sat in his room in the "safe house" in a quiet road in North Finchley. He drank coffee.

Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.

Sentimental rubbish.

Revolutionary warfare was about victory. He was no advo-cate of glorious failure martyrdom. If a cadre of the Umkonto we Sizwe were to attack the maximum security section of Pretoria Central then they must succeed, they must free their condemned comrades. The agony of the decision lay in a particular area. It was the area that had stuck with him, caused him to drink his fourth and fifth and sixth cups of coffee, stayed with him through half a packet of cigarettes.

The physician had told him to smoke as much as pleased him. The pain was more frequent. Was the Movement better served by saving Happy Zikala and Charlie Schoba and Percy Ngoye and Tom Mweshtu and James Carew from the gallows? Did the Movement gain more from the martyrdom of the Pritchard Five?

Which?

Better for the Movement to have at freedom five men who had bungled an attack, or better to have five heroes buried while the world screamed anger at Pretoria?

Which?

8

"Have you made your decision?"

Jack had come early to the "safe house". When the door had been opened to his ring he had smelled the aroma of sweet spices from the kitchen. She had been a tall woman with the dark skin of the Bengali and had two children clinging to her sari. She had shown no surprise, only taken him to the foot of the stairs and pointed upwards to the closed door.

"So direct. Should you not give me time to offer you coffee, to ask you to sit?"

He thought Jacob Thiroko had slept less than he had.

The coffee mug stood amongst stain rings on the table.

Beside it was an ashtray and the empty matchbox that had been used when the ashtray had spilled over. Thiroko sat at the table. The haze of smoke filled a strata of the room, morning mist over a damp meadow. Thiroko sat at the table. There was no other chair, only the unmade bed for Jack.

"I just need your decision. I want explosives, I want to prove myself to you, then I want help."

Jack saw the sadness on Thiroko's face. He knew it was the sadness of a military commander who sent young men onto the dirty battleground of revolutionary warfare.

"I'm going, Mr Thiroko, with your help or without it.

With your help I'll make a better job of it."

Thiroko stood and pulled out his shirt from his trousers.

He lifted the back shirt tail, and then his vest up to his shoulders. Jack saw the thin welt of the scar, pink on the dark skin, running diagonally across the length of his back.

"Sjambok
, rhino hide whip. It is the way the police break up demonstrations. They use the
sjambok
when they do not think it necessary to shoot. I was a politician before they whipped me, I was a soldier afterwards . . . "

Jack had his answer, his elation shone.

"I take a gamble on you, a small gamble. A few pounds of explosive. Nothing more until you have proved yourself."

They clasped hands.

Jack said he would fly within two days. Thiroko told him where he should stay, to wait for a contact, and thereafter, since he would be travelling in his own name, to keep on the move.

"Where will you be, Mr Thiroko?"

"I will be in Lusaka."

"You won't have long to wait." Jack was smiling.

Thiroko's face clouded with anger. "You are all children.

You think it is a game. Last night I shamed myself with my thoughts. I thought whether it was better for our Movement if those five should hang. I considered whether five men dead was of more advantage to us than those five men free. I know the answer and I prayed for forgiveness on my knees . . . What will be your target for your explosives?"

Jack could smell the sweat on the sheets. "I don't know."

Thiroko laughed with amusement. "You are clever to be cautious."

"I don't know what the target will be, honestly."

Thiroko seemed not to have heard him. "We say that we trust each other, and we are strangers. There are men and women whom I have worked with for many years, and I do not know whether I can trust them. It was sensible of you not to have gone to our offices."

"I trust you, Mr Thiroko."

"It is a small building. Always full of people hurrying, busy, greeting each other, telling each other of their commit-

ment to the Movement. But there are worms there rotting our cause. They may have been purchased by the Boers, they may have been compromised by threats against their family still in South Africa. No way of knowing. But you have my word that only those who
must
know will know of your journey."

"Thank you."

"You will be foolish if you underestimate the forces you are up against. If you are caught, you will wish that you could die to escape the pain the Boers will inflict on you.

They will put electric shocks on you, keep you from sleeping, they will spin the chambers of a service revolver beside your head, they will starve you, they will hang you upside down from the ceiling with a broomstick under your knees and spin you, they will parade you naked in front of the men and women who work in the security police offices in John Vorster Square. It is where your father was, John Vorster Square . . . Trust nobody, trust only yourself."

"Do you know my father?"

"I know of him. He would know of me."

"I'll tell him about you."

Thiroko asked quietly, "If it were not your father . . .?"

"I wouldn't have known who the Pritchard Five were."

"I like honesty, Mr Curwen, but honesty will not help you in South Africa. Be the cheat. Cheat the Boers out of the satisfaction of five hangings."